Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco ACI comparison

Akamai and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Akamai is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.8, while Cisco is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0. Akamai holds a 21.5% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 4.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Read 18 Akamai Guardicore Segmentation reviews

7,980 Views
5,347 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Cisco ACI

Read 102 Cisco ACI reviews

3,819 Views
2,521 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Cisco ACI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

Cisco ACI and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation compete in the network automation and security platforms category. Cisco ACI holds a slight advantage due to its robust integration capabilities and centralized management, making it an attractive choice for existing environments.

Features: Cisco ACI excels in automation, scalability, and programmability, offering centralized management for diverse environments like VMware and Azure. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation's strengths lie in powerful visibility, ease of policy creation, and comprehensive platform support alongside strong micro-segmentation capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Cisco ACI faces challenges with complexity and a steep learning curve, requiring improvements in documentation and third-party service integration. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation needs enhancements in policy management automation, cost-effectiveness, and better integration with leading security appliances.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco ACI's deployment process is challenging, particularly in complex environments, but it benefits from comprehensive technical support, though inconsistencies in service quality are noted. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers easier initial setup due to its modern design; however, it requires improvement in its support resources.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco ACI is viewed as expensive, with licensing costs as a barrier but justified by potential long-term savings and operational efficiency. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation commands a premium price, with advanced capabilities providing enhanced network security and operational efficiency that justify the investment despite high costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco ACI Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco ACI

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (12th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (6th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)

Cisco ACI

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

102

Ranking in other categories

Network Virtualization (1st), Software Defined Networking (SDN) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 21.5%, down from 24.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco ACI is 4.7%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	21.5%
Cisco ACI	4.7%
Other	73.8%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma

Solution Architecht at Inspira Enterprise

Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing

Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.

Read full review

Rahul Khandelwal

Network Technical Manager at KPMG

Enables streamlined data center management with automation and application-centric design

The main features of Cisco ACI that I really appreciate are the application-centric and network-centric designs, allowing you to create your network according to your application. That's helpful, and it's good for one-time implementation. The automation capabilities are really helpful. We deployed one data center using Terraform, and after deployment, many automation features are available, which can be very helpful. Based on my experience, Cisco ACI provides substantial capability; you can design your network accordingly and it's part of the SDN family, providing many benefits to the organization, especially when moving from traditional network infrastructure. Many organizations are actually using the old traditional Nexus infrastructure or some old data center devices. It gives you significant control and one-time implementation capabilities, and it also provides better performance and security. Functionality-wise, Cisco ACI provides integration using automation. We implemented it through Terraform, which was easy. Those features are available, so I don't think any new features are needed right now; something new could come up, but they have implemented many improvements over the years.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."

"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility."

"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."

"Its deception features are great, providing a rich telemetry of lured origins, and are a great resource for any active defense strategy."

"The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."

"I found the solution to be stable."

"Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see microsegmentation as distributed services."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"I recommend Cisco ACI due to its reliable tech support, timely updates for security, traffic management, and ease of management."

"I especially like the host-based routing feature of Cisco ACI because it's straightforward to do it on different data centers. Another valuable feature of Cisco ACI is that its management controller works very well with no issues."

"It has saved me a couple of times, as just a backup feature. It can easily do a snapshot before you do any change, and if something goes wrong, you can just rollback."

"We will improve our organization using the automation."

"This solution allows you to do everything quicker and more efficiently."

"It is more scalable than our previous products."

"It is very easy to do the configuration after you know how to work with the product. It is global, so you change one interface, and changes are reflected on every switch."

"Cisco ACI was the first product in the market, offering stability with a significant install base."

More Cisco ACI pros

Cons

"Customers would want to see the cost improved."

"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."

"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."

"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."

"Supports become difficult when it's for a big organization. For a small organization, medium organization, it still makes sense, however, for a big organization, it makes life difficult."

"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."

"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."

"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"Cisco SDN will only work with its own devices, so that's a downside."

"It needs to be able to function on the cloud."

"Cisco needs to enhance their technical support and pay more attention to regional support."

"It needs more features for integrating with third-party vendors."

"My complaint about this is: We purchased the ACI gear, but to do monitoring, to do stats, to do telemetry statistics, etc. we have to purchase another product from Cisco."

"Before version 5, you could manage your firewall or load balancer from the AP. It was very basic and now they removed the whole features in the new version, so you cannot manage your load balance or firewall from your AP on L2, L4, and L7 services."

"It could benefit from an orchestration tool that makes deploying services easier."

"We're still in the process of doing the migration. We haven't migrated completely all of our applications out of our legacy into it yet. It was challenging at first, but getting easier now that we're starting to get into it."

More Cisco ACI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"The customer would complain about the cost."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"It saves time and resources."

"Yearly, we pay around one point two million for the solution."

"We bought a package for hardware, software, and support. At that time, Cisco was simply selling that package to distributors, then we opted for it directly."

"We have seen time improvement using the product."

"Cisco is much more expensive than other vendors, especially when it comes to the licensing."

"We used Cisco Professional Services for the deployment. They were outstanding, but very expensive."

"Cisco ACI is more expensive than Juniper, however, ACI is not the most expensive option."

"There are no additional costs. We only have to pay for a support contract apart from the license."

More Cisco ACI pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	21
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	87

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.

See all answers

What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?

Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?

When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...

See all answers

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?

There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...

See all answers

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?

Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco ACI?

The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution.

See all answers

Comparisons

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 45% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 10% of the time

Cisco Secure Workload vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 9% of the time

Zero Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Cisco Secure Workload vs Cisco ACI

Compared 25% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco ACI

Compared 19% of the time

HPE SDN vs Cisco ACI

Compared 11% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco ACI

Compared 10% of the time

Juniper Contrail Networking vs Cisco ACI

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco ACI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

October 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI

October 2025

Download Cisco ACI product report

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

No data available

Overview

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

Cisco ACI provides advanced capabilities with features like seamless integration with VMware and APIs for programmability. It offers centralized management for streamlined operations, efficient micro-segmentation, and robust security, addressing modern data center needs.

Cisco ACI brings automation to data center infrastructure, enabling transitions from legacy to modern environments with centralized management. Organizations benefit from optimized server farms, seamless integration with VMware, and support for Kubernetes, making it suitable for large-scale environments. Offering support for healthcare, finance, and public sectors, Cisco ACI facilitates tasks such as virtual networking and multi-site connectivity with application-centric and network-centric designs.

What are the key features of Cisco ACI?

Seamless Integration with VMware: Ensures smooth operation with existing virtualized environments.
Programmability via APIs: Offers flexibility in network configuration and management through APIs.
Centralized Management: Provides a unified view of the network, simplifying oversight.
Automation: Reduces manual configuration workload, speeding up deployment.
Scalability: Adapts to growing network demands with ease.
Robust Security: Enhances protection against threats with comprehensive security measures.
Efficient Micro-Segmentation: Improves network segmentation for security and efficiency.

What benefits or ROI should users look for when evaluating Cisco ACI?

Streamlined Operation: Reduced complexity in network management.
Enhanced Performance: Improved network and application efficiency.
Cost Efficiency: Better resource allocation reduces operational costs.
Improved Security: Advanced features for increased protection.
Scalability: Allows growth without significant redesigns.

In the healthcare industry, Cisco ACI supports secure and efficient data management, accommodating regulatory needs and enhancing patient data handling. Financial institutions benefit from robust security and seamless integration with existing infrastructures, facilitating smooth transaction processing. In the public sector, it's utilized for reliable network management and servicing a diverse range of applications.

Cisco

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE

Bowling Green State University, du, Qatar University

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco ACI

September 2025

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